Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid by William D. Lopez (review)

Book Reviews 199 shrinking tax base, nor could bankruptcy bring back lost federal and state support to offset pressures on public welfare.” (xix) That last point about the loss of federal and state aid is a key to the puzzle. As Kirshner writes, assistance to cities peaked in 1978. Since then, Detroit and other cities have lost out on untold billions in dollars that were once promised but never delivered. “We have overestimated the ability of cities and their residents to combat powerful forces like automation, suburbanization, the recent financial crisis and deindustrialization,” she writes. (xxii) A reader might quibble that all cities suffer many of the same problems as Detroit. But, as Kirshner asserts, the Motor City may represent the extreme end of the scale of urban distress. And she is certainly on target that the highly touted bankruptcy—one of the transformative events in Detroit’s recent history—did little or nothing for many of the city’s struggling residents. “The lives that Broke chronicles show us what bankruptcy cannot accomplish,” she concludes in a downbeat cod. “They show us the hard work of combating individual poverty must take precedence over facile, short-term urban fixes.” (283) That’s a lesson of special relevance for Detroit. As Miles, one of the people Kirshner profiles, tells her in the book, “Detroit’s a good thing when it’s going good.” (xv) But no city can prosper if it’s at its best only when the going is good. John Gallagher Author and journalist William D. Lopez. Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 232. Works cited. Hardcover: $27.95. William D. Lopez’s Separated details how mixed-status families navigate everyday life and institutions by focusing on a Midwestern county in Michigan. Mixed-status families are those that have a parent or parents in the United States without citizenship while their kids might. Separated focuses on an immigration raid of an auto shop and the deportation of a person named Santiago. It highlights the experiences of individuals in the raid beyond Santiago that was led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents with the help of local police departments to show the trauma they create within multiple families via the deportability of individuals. 200 The Michigan Historical Review The interactions between people from Santiago’s family with agencies and institutions are used by Lopez to stress that the border is enforced far from a southern wall. He writes that the stories in the book are violent and life altering by showing how enforcement tactics are militarized with “little regard to the physical and psychological damage done to those at whom they are directed, their families, or their communities.” (15) Separated uses Washtenaw County to analyze people’s relationship with the US deportation machine by detailing how it operates in their everyday lives whether citizen or not. Lopez argues that while we must look at the extravagant displays of police violence, there is also much to be gained by examining the difficulty mixed-status families face when trying to navigate things as simple as purchasing groceries. The book is split into three sections surrounding the events of the raid. Part I explores the community and its people before the raid while the two chapters in Part II explore the raid itself. Part III approaches the aftermath of the raid, which is followed by a conclusion and epilogue that highlight the months post-raid to understand the longer-lasting ramifications and impact of deportations on families. Lopez uses over twenty-four interviews to analyze the context of the raid. This includes interviews with family members involved, local community activists, and police officials. He combines these with ethnography and thick description of the neighborhood based on living and volunteering in the community and going for ride-alongs with police officers. A major contribution the book makes about ICE, policing, and the deportation machine is the ramifications on mixed-status families and their mental and physical health. For example, Lopez indicates how a mother could no longer produce breast milk due to the susto, or scare, they experienced during the raid...